My Battle With Self-Harm

You read the title….. This post actually makes me extremely nervous tbh. I’ve been putting off writing it for quite some time now, especially last week. I wanted to write it, but anxiety obviously had other plans so I didn’t. For anyone who has depression/anxiety/any other mental illness or self-harms, this might end up being kinda detailed. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out yet. I’m just letting my fingers run so taking that into consideration, if you think this post may trigger you, or cause you stress or anything like that, please I encourage you to turn back. I don’t want you to start feeling uncomfortable or if you self-harm I don’t want you to start feeling that “burning itch” especially if you’ve been clean for a while. Still here?….. Okay…. Here’s my story I guess… This is going to be kinda long, so if you plan to read it all. Get comfy

Everything kinda started my freshman year in high school I think. Yeah, that’s when my depression first started. I had friends, sort of. They hung with me in classes and at lunch and sometimes invited me to hang out on the weekends. Most times though I couldn’t go because my step mother didn’t let me. Or she’d ask me a million stupid questions and by the time she said yes I really didn’t even want to go anymore or whatever we were going to do was already over and done. My dad was the only one working, and whenever he wasn’t working he was at his cigar spot with his buddies playing poker or some other gambling game. I didn’t really mind though. He was doing what he needed to do to bring money into the house.

My depression progressively got worse for the next 3 years. Nobody had known except my best friend (who is now my girlfriend actually). She’s the only one I had told for the longest. She couldn’t do much because we lived in different states, but she was there for me when she could be, and she’ll never know how much I appreciated that. And still do to this day. But of course things wouldn’t just stay that way would it? Senior year is when everything spiraled completely out of control, and I started to lose myself. My depression had gotten worse and worse, and now anxiety was finally starting to make an appearance. Match those together with a giant yearlong mandatory school project that will determine whether you pass or fail the 12th grade and graduate, and getting a job, looking for colleges, doing SAT’s and of course the regular everyday high school student activities, and what do you have? For anyone without a mental illness; just a really big pain in the ass, but for someone with a mental illness, it’s the scariest, most anxiety inducing year of school ever. But I tried my hardest to deal with it.

I won’t go into details about the project, but ironically I did mines on depression. Have you ever had a dream that you felt was super real, and then at some point in the future a piece of that dream actually happens and you realize it, and you kinda freak out for a second? Well that’s exactly what happened to me. I had a dream one night that on my first day of work, before I left the house, I would take my step brothers box cutter, and make three small cuts on my left wrist….. At the time I figured it was just a really really weird dream. Yeah I was hella sad or numb most days but there’s no way in HELL I would cut myself right? Well I was wrong as I could be. Because the first day I started my job that’s what had happened. I had gotten into another argument with my step mother, and it made me feel…. Well it made me feel like shit ya’know? After she left me alone, I just sort of snapped and started moving on auto pilot. I knew my step brother left his extra box cutter in the kitchen drawer just in case he ever lost his original one at work somewhere. I grabbed it, ran upstairs to my room and locked the door. I just kinda sat on the floor leaning against my bed looking at it. Not really thinking just kind of existing, and before I knew it, I started digging it into my skin. Not deep at all, barely only surface, just enough to draw blood. Drawing it across 3 times. One right under the other. I heard my step brother yell my name rushing me so we could head to work. I snapped back into reality. I didn’t know what to do about the blood, so I just wiped it on my blanket, which happened to be dark red anyway so it didn’t appear. And since the cuts weren’t deep they were barely visible and had already stopped bleeding. But I knew they were there. I could still feel the blade against my skin. Tearing at it, pealing it apart. I tried not to focus on that though, it was my first day at work and I needed to focus, and do my job well, even though I was nothing but a bagger at a grocery store. But hey it was money, and I needed that. Nobody noticed the scars that were developing on my wrists that day, but it paranoid me that someone may see them and automatically know that I did that to myself.

It was weird and the most panicked I had ever been about anything actually. And unfortunately it was summer and hot and since I was doing manual labor it wasn’t a good idea to wear one of my hoodies or long sleeve shirts. You would think that alone would’ve stopped me from cutting again right? Nope wrong. My depression deepened as time went on, not really for any particular reason either honestly. It was just… there. Looming around me like a snake wrapping around me trapping me in my own self destructive thoughts. I couldn’t escape and I couldn’t run. I couldn’t do anything but sit and listen. This is when I started using Tumblr a lot. I was on it almost all day every day. I don’t really know where the thought came from to get on it, but wherever it originated from it stuck, because I realized that there were SO many people going through what I was going through on there. I still felt alone, but it wasn’t as bad. Unfortunately that didn’t help my depression at all. The late nights and cuts kept coming. Getting deeper each time. It was almost like a ritual. Waiting until everyone was sleep, pulling the box cutter from under my pillow (that’s where I hid it), sliding onto the floor and slicing into my own skin. This happened almost every other night until my step brother started needing his box cutter because he lost the other one.

After that happened I started trying knives and scissors, but they didn’t work. They never made me bleed, and as fucked up as it sounds, that irritated the hell outta me. Eventually I started finding friends at school whom I had something in common with…. We all had depression and anxiety. These became the people I hung around most often. Because I didn’t have to try to hide it, we had all caught each other’s scars before so we knew they were there. We never commented on them. But we knew they were there, that in a way made us closer. I thought at one point that maybe I was getting better. I learned really quickly though that I was wrong. One night at work, my depression was at the worst point that it had been since I’d starting cutting. I was at work and we had cameras everywhere so I obviously could just yank out my pencil sharpener blade (that actually I had stolen cause I was too broke to afford it) and cut. SO I decided to try something I had seen on Tumblr. I grabbed a red pen near me and started drawing on my wrists, when the store didn’t have any customers. I thought that had made it better and for a few hours it did. I felt slightly less depressed. But later after I got off work and was home, after just getting out of a very relaxing and lovely bath… My depression spiked, it literally came out of nowhere like a nuclear bomb, spreading over my entire body, covering me in this big black dark nightmarish cloud. It completely enveloped me and there was no way to escape.

I quickly threw on some clothes, grabbed my sharpener and went back into the bathroom. This particular night I didn’t lock the door for some reason. I was in too much of a trance to think about anything other than what I was about to do. I sat on the floor in front of the sink, and pushed the blade into my skin. I had become so used to the sharp sudden pain of it as I’ve done this so many times now. I made cut after cut after cut. Watching the blood running down my arm hoping for some release from this superbly shitty feeling that was moving around me. But it wasn’t coming. I began to think “maybe if I just end it all, everything will work out. “ I decided that was what I was going to do…. With one final slice I would finish this and everything would be over. But just as I started dragging the blade across my wrist, pushing it deeper very close to a vital artery, I suddenly thought of my best friend and how she would feel if I killed myself and as if on instinct I eased up on the pressure. I started crying and threw the blade across the room. I didn’t want to do this anymore. I couldn’t leave her alone. No matter how much I hated myself now, I knew I would hate myself even more if I went through with my plan. For some reason my step mother came looking for me, and found me curled into a ball of blood and tears on the floor. She started to freak out, panicking and called my father. Both of them were going into a frenzy and oddly enough I was the only calm one. After they realized that the bleeding would stop, the cuts were just really deep, they bandaged me up and called an emergency meeting with my therapist the next day.

During our meeting he recommended that I have a consultation with a local psychological hospital, he didn’t think that they would decide to keep me. As he believed I was no longer a threat to myself, but I guess what me and the doctor talked about during the consultation led him to believe otherwise. Because they decided to keep me for a week (I’ll write on that another time). After I got out I thought I was getting better. I was close to graduation, I had stopped cutting for a while (although some nights I went back to it). But on March 13, I decided I was done with cutting. I threw away all of my blades. It’s been a struggle since then but I’m a little over a year clean from cutting!

I moved away from that place I was in, and although my depression isn’t completely gone, I’m handling it a lot better now than I was. And now I really need to stop this story because my keyboard is being soaked in tears… Uhmmm I love you guys, please love and be kind to yourselves. Don’t be you own worst enemy. And if you ever need to talk, I don’t care if it’s like 3 or 4 in the morning, send me a message on twitter, Facebook, an email, whatever it is. Hell tag me in a post saying you need someone right now and I’ll answer okay? Stay safe guys. <3

Thank you for being brave enough to share this. I had a friend actually just start cutting and I’m just at a loss at what I should do. I’m glad that you were able to get the help you needed and that you’ve now been clean for a year! Keep it up. Sadly it seems depression and anxiety never fully go away but if you ever need someone to chat with I’m always willing to listen. (:

Oh no! Honestly i would say try not to bring it up. We already feel pretty bad about doing it and try very hard to hide it. If you’ve noticed or they’ve told you, don’t mention it. One thing me and my friends who were also depressed did for each other kinda often were like goody bags of sort. It’d contain band-aids, a small thing of tissue, some candy or chocolate, a cute little note and mines used to contain lyrics from my favorite bands! It was cool. Things like that can really help sometimes.

Just a little weirdo obsessed with writing, music and a girl named Alyson